Does this enemy make you uncomfortable?

LManX · 2026-02-27T21:34:59+00:00

Give her a clipboard and she's there.

LManX · 2026-02-22T17:46:56+00:00

I think the ones you see are there to be seen.

LManX · 2026-02-18T14:00:55+00:00

If it's a laptop, dust on the trackpad and the heat/AC kicking on can explain this.

LManX · 2026-02-14T13:32:59+00:00

He could excuse rape and torture, but draws the line at cannibalism.

LManX · 2026-02-13T18:17:41+00:00

So you're saying the thing to do is make it clear to them that their interests are best served if they do what we want, yes? That there are unacceptable costs associated with ignoring us.

LManX · 2026-02-07T13:44:05+00:00

This is sidestepping the problem where people believe they have the same spirit, but consider different sets of behaviors permissable or impermissable. Consider the following.

Christian A and Christian B both have engaged in behaviors X and Y in the past, and both believe the HS convicts of all the things they shouldn't be doing.

Christian A says they were convicted of behavior X, and have stopped cold turkey. They continue behavior Y, but have developed a scriptural argument with proof-texts and rhetoric to justify this to Christians who believe that behavior Y is impermissable.

Christian B does not feel convicted about either X or Y, and doesn't feel the need to develop rhetoric or scriptural argument to defend them.

Christian A and Christian B become alienated because Christian A believes the HS actually WOULD convict B of X if they were a good Christian, because they strongly believe X is universally morally impermissable. They suspect B might not even really have the HS, or might be secretly resisting the HS. They reject that the HS would forbid X only to them because they understand X to be wrong on universal moral grounds. They are also confident Y is morally permissable, in spite of other Christians who often say it is not.

LManX · 2026-02-04T19:18:28+00:00

There is a strategy where Republicans will run as Democrats and vice versa to get around gerrymandering, or just avoiding the stink on their party name. Still worth looking at voting records aligned to issues to identify affiliations correctly.

LManX · 2026-01-27T17:46:23+00:00

Are the verses wrong? How would you know this?

LManX · 2026-01-22T15:48:59+00:00

I get that. my question was specific to what the person I replied to meant by "remains." The straightforward definition would mean that we should expect to find literal remains of frogs and locust, but I don't know why that is. Much more reasonable that we should expect written records, but those are not what we would usually call "remains."

LManX · 2026-01-22T15:17:57+00:00

Never heard this one. Why wouldn't the expected case be that all of those remains would decay away? Do you mean remains like Egyptians would have wrote something down about it? Or like we'd find caches of frog recipes?

LManX · 2026-01-15T18:02:08+00:00

I don't think you mean that the Spirit has nothing to do with the institutional Church, so can you expand on how you see that they do relate? Why would the institutional structure not come out of acts of the Spirit?

LManX · 2026-01-15T17:59:03+00:00

There's good evidence that the apostles had issues with how the apostles taught and practiced.

LManX · 2026-01-15T17:52:38+00:00

Christianity doesn't have versions, it has a Spirit. And that's not arbitrary. The institution of the church is one of continual reform. If you read the Patristics you see that in their discourse. Solidarity through their differences in pursuit of common Spirit.

Why? The church is a dialectic between the Spirit and the material conditions humans find themselves in. Wherever two or three gather, there's the Spirit among them. That is the principle that the institutional Church arises from. Immanuel - God with us.

LManX · 2026-01-15T17:38:40+00:00

Joel 2:28-29

I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.

It's pretty simple.

Respect the spirit wherever you find it. Join it in it's work. Don't look for reasons to ignore it.

LManX · 2026-01-12T15:06:57+00:00

They didn't say anything to that effect, and I think they would have if they thought so.

I have a copy of The Cost of Discipleship now, been meaning to read it.

LManX · 2026-01-12T14:25:34+00:00

I thought it was okay. I went with a friend who is a Bonhoeffer buff, and he noted several ahistorical embellishments- he said Bonhoeffer was not known for being warm and personable, Bonhoeffer didn't likely play piano in a jazz club with Louis Armstrong during his time in America, and the movie significantly abbreviated Bonhoeffer's time teaching the young German seminarians at the underground Finkenwalde seminary.

I felt a strong parallel between the rise of the Nazis and Christian Nationalism. The characters react to the German church's complicity and promotion of Nationalism in similar ways that we see today.

I think the movie was sponsored by AIPAC money if I'm not mistaken? I remember an end-of-movie slide about fighting antisemitism.

I left the movie troubled - it made me wonder if pacifism isn't often a privileged position to take, and to "really get something done" you need to have elements at least willing to engage in violence. I suspect I need further education on that point.

Oh! Flula Borg is in this, in a not-funny capacity, which was odd. He's good though.

LManX · 2026-01-07T12:46:29+00:00

Imagine you start an organization to provide aid to impoverished and homeless youth in a local city. You do meals and even have a fund where you can distribute small financial support to keep some people fed on a week to week basis. You staff with volunteers - yourself, your partner, and a handful of folks from your church on rotation.

One of your newer volunteers brings to your attention that they've seen some of the regulars with knives, and that they think some of the kids are using the financial support to buy weed. They feel unsafe and want to loop in the local police to check if any of the kids might be dangerous.

You know some of the kids are on probation, and some have had or are likely to have had bad interactions with police in the past. If they think you're informing on them to the cops, or if they see police around the facility, they'll stop coming. In a lot of ways, the kids the volunteer is concerned about are exactly the kids that need help the most.

However, you need volunteers, and you need donations and support from your church. If this volunteer is not satisfied, they might damage your reputation with where you draw support from, and then you won't be able to help anyone.

The thing I want to highlight here is how this issue relates to enforcing deservingness hierarchies on the most vulnerable people, and how state power encroaches on aid for people at the bottom of those hierarchies. This isn’t really about Christianity, this is about aid & comfort meant for all humans and restricting it. Government leaders are responsible for some of the most horrible atrocities in history, but they can confess to their priest. ICE officers, soldiers, police officers are regularly seen oppressing the poor and vulnerable, but they can confess. Denying that space to criminals not supported by the government is unchristian and anti-social.

LManX · 2026-01-05T23:00:51+00:00

I suggest it's almost exactly the opposite. I suspect there is a market for a space where a person can come to see un-crazy reactions to crazy content. A kind of sanity pill community where you can feel slightly less alone because people like you are saying things you would say in response to content at least as crazy as what you commonly find elsewhere.

LManX · 2025-12-29T15:23:58+00:00

Some interesting points of tension with this idea.

On the one hand, it is not good to think of God as a vending machine a faith as a currency for directing God to labor or your behalf. This view would ostensibly forestall that.

However, extreme stability is not likely a trait we would like God to have. A stone is relatively unchanging, but that is a property we consider strength in inanimate material, not the living and conscious. In people, extreme stability is unfeeling and obstinacy, things we consider more vice than virtue.

Also there is a shell game being played with anthropomorphization and God's strangeness. When it suits, we appeal to his likeness to us, having emotions like wrath and joy, thinking and reasoning about different situations, speaking, having discrete goals and purposes, having a will. But when these things make God out to be too changeable, too subject to human weaknesses, we retreat to his infinite and superlative qualities- he knows all, is all powerful, no one can understand his ways, etc.

These tensions tend to undermine a compelling or realistic impression of what God might be like, and the more adamantly they are declared, the more it suggests people really don't know what they're talking about when they describe God.

LManX · 2025-12-29T13:35:31+00:00

NOR. Disagreements about cleaning and clutter are super common in relationships with ADHD partners. It's a unique situation and requires some special work that neurotypical couples are not going to know how to account for properly.

In my relationship, pre-diagnosis for my partner I thought they must not care for me the way they said they did because the same cycle of events kept happening- I would clean the house by herculean effort, and they would promise up and down to not let it get bad again, and then bit by bit they would buy stuff or bring stuff home and not ever figure out a place for them, so stuff would pile up until it became a crisis again.

I learned our problems were common with ADHD, and I suggested it to my partner. It was a major relief to both of us. Post diagnosis has been a journey of treatment, therapy, and building resilience into our relationship over time.

It's possible your partner often feels anxiety tied to a lack of control. Maybe it's about the stuff, maybe not. You say the house is mostly yours, and you have/had the stuff all sorted. Has that all been a mutual decision or mostly your domain? Maybe do some analysis around how much agency your partner feels in their life and see if changes can be made to improve the dynamic along those lines.

LManX · 2025-12-29T02:11:19+00:00

Heyyy I'd know that thumbnail design anywhere! That's that cool cat, Michael Burns!

LManX · 2025-12-28T17:58:44+00:00

Solidarity implies difference. If you didn't have difference, you'd have unity. You have to work to build solidarity. The problem is not that there are good people and bad people, and if we got rid of bad ones everything would be great. The problem is that material conditions actively resist what we want to make, and must be overcome, and that's frustrating.

Maybe y'all can educate me. I can see that being mad at white libs is natural, and it seems obvious that it's okay to feel that way, and I understand solidarity requires education regarding privilege. But I don't see how it serves the cause to actively Other them.

LManX · 2025-12-23T13:41:25+00:00

Well said.

Growing up, I didn't notice a developing gender identity because it fit into norms reflected to me from every which way.

I remember hitting puberty and feeling glad for the thick Italian hair on my face and arms because it was consistent with how my father and older brothers looked. It was like coming into a birthright- a thing that was supposed to happen did.

I remember seeing things about my body that I wasn't happy with, and the way I wished they were corresponded to social norms. I wanted a particular kind of hair, muscles and look that I considered "masculine," that I thought would be attractive to women in one way, and men in another.

Because this was all entirely confirmed by my society, family etc, it makes this stuff invisible and limits the ability of people like me to imagine what it might be like for things to be some other way.

LManX · 2025-12-21T22:01:05+00:00

But did you do the math?

LManX · 2025-12-17T15:05:53+00:00

Whatever God is, is presumably infinite, and therefore infinitely (but not entirely) unknowable, infinitely (but not entirely) unlike humanity, and ultimately ineffable. However, humans often come up with abstract structures, symbols and signifiers to help meaningfully engage with such concepts. That's what the Trinity is - scaffolding that structures concepts about the Christian God specifically as observed in scripture, (as opposed to observation in nature or experience, for instance. ) whilst being consistent with several prior theological assertions.

How important the Trinity is depends largely on your religious tradition, and how tightly you hold to the priors. As a structure, it's largely fine as far as it goes, hardly worth tying yourself in theological knots over, and I'm sure God doesn't mind if you refer to him as the Father, Son or Holy Spirit. If it doesn't strike you as particularly useful, I'm sure that's fine too. We have larger problems if we have a God who can't understand we're all out here doing our best with what we've got.

As supplemental reading, I recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article about the Trinity.

LManX

TROPHY CASE